Bill Nash: I'm not ready for keyboards to 'infer' what I want to type

Like nearly everybody else these days, more and more, I find myself typing with my thumbs. To be fair, my typing has always looked a little like I was using my thumbs, or my elbows, but the advent of the smartphone has us all using only 20 percent of our digits, and nobody seems to be complaining.

Well, I am. A little. What bothers me is I’m typing without a keyboard. It’s just a picture of a keyboard that somehow seems to know what I’m trying to type when I pass my thumbs over it. And I don’t like that either. It keeps suggesting words for me. And not the words I want. If I wanted those words, I would have typed them, but apparently Apple knows more than I do. Ask anyone.

I used to have a Blackberry phone. I liked it because it actually had a fairly standard “qwerty” keyboard with keys you could press. My kids made fun of me because I would lay it down on a table and type on it, like it was a miniature typewriter. Then the touch screens came along and, with them, virtual keyboards.

I type quite a bit on my iPhone and it works out pretty well, as long as we’re in agreement with my vocabulary. And not in bright sunlight. And not in a hurry. But now, technology companies are looking for ways to replace even these virtual keyboards.

According to a recent article in The Wall Street Journal, “New-wave keyboards work to ‘infer’ what the user is trying to type. They use evidence collected about the user, like typing history on social networks, where they are on the Web, or what terms are trending on the Web to determine what word to select next.”

Maybe it’s just me, but I find that frightening. Typing is my job, so I type a lot. And now my phone is going to use that against me? I also don’t believe the technology exists that can “infer” what’s going to come out of my head next. And if you don’t believe me, you can ask my wife.

One company in Israel, Snapkeys, plans to eliminate the traditional keyboard entirely, replacing it with four “keys” that each represent three commonly-used letters. The letters that aren’t frequently used don’t appear at all. The phone will somehow be able to fill in the blanks as you type making the system, the company says, three times faster than a traditional keyboard.

That’s really not a selling point for me. I like typing and I like a traditional keyboard. Really traditional. I learned how to type on a manual typewriter and I still type that way, pounding the keys. I miss being able to hit the “period” key hard enough to punch a hole in the paper.

My laptop stands up pretty well to the pounding, but if I really want to put some emotion into my writing, I can pull out two old standards. I’m currently restoring a classic Underwood No. 5 typewriter that was manufactured in 1916, and I love typing on an old manual Smith Corona of an undetermined age, but it is what I used in college decades ago.

These typewriters make no attempt to infer what I am thinking. I love them for that. And their sticking keys, manual returns and full-size keyboards truly make writing a verb. I may be forced to use my thumbs on the phone, but I’m glad I can still use all 10 fingers at my desk.